to Santa Ana, Sonora, before taking a detour west, passing trough Pueblo Nuevo and Altar. When they finally arrive in Caborca, they search for Cesárea but can’t find her, so they carry on with her journey. Many other towns in Sonora appear in Bolaño’s work. The main setting of 2666 is the town of Santa Teresa, Sonora, a place inspired by Ciudad Juárez, located in the neighboring state of Chihuahua. Bolaño wrote much of his work inside apartments in Barcelona and Blanes, armed with maps of Sonora that were scattered about the floor and sometimes taped to the walls. These maps supplied him with the phonetics and names that became essential to his work. These names, which may seem spontaneous to readers, were more calculated than any of the murders in Woes of the True Policeman, Bolaño’s final (at least for now) posthumous novel. The violence of the region is another one of Bolaño’s themes: One of the last things he wrote, before his death at the age of 50, was “El Policía de Ratas” (“Police Rat”), a short story that describes a shocking murder in an idyllic community of rodents. (It also shares multiple parallels with “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,” Kafka’s last short story.) Kino Bay doesn’t appear in any of Bolaño’s books. But it was here, on this particular evening, that we paid the author tribute in the form of a spontaneous reading of his poetry. The critics consider the poems bad, especially when compared with the Chilean’s narrative work, and Bolaño himself admitted as much in an interview: “I wrote poems that can’t stand the passage of time. My trip to Europe made me look at my own poetry differently.” Some of his verses, however, gain more poetic sense when one is familiar with Sonora, especially if one is currently standing within its borders. At the reading, some of the poems were recited with the accompaniment of norteño music in the background. The night’s readers included Alejandro Almazán, an author who had just completed a novel about the world’s most-wanted narco-trafficker, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera; Carlos Sánchez, who runs a literary workshop at the Hermosillo jail for women accused of murder; Felipe de Jesús Larios, the best journalist in Sonora, who always describes his lovers as sicarias (hired assassins) and never as girlfriends; and José Luis Valencia, author of the truly infrarealist short story “La Poeta Gorda” (“The Fat Poet”), dedicated to a poet whose naked body adorns the covers of her books. Lorenzo Pinelli, our host, also read a few poems not far from the Sonora cops. A splendid night. In addition to Bolaño’s poetry, the night included conversations about proctologists from the town of Agua Prieta and fishing boats full of cocaine en route to Los Angeles, and stories told by an old man who looked like a shadow. When he talked, he did so with sand in his eyes and at the edges of his mouth. He told us his name was Pedro Carrillo and that he was born in Navolato, Sinaloa. It’s also the hometown of Carrillo Fuentes, the capo of Ciudad Juárez, but he assured us that they were not his relatives, but with that last name and gloomy face, no one believed him. As the night wound on there was also a conversation about a fearsome gang known as Los Ponis, and about Uncle Celerino, that sinister character from the countryside who told his stories to one of his nephews, the celebrated Mexican author and photographer Juan Rulfo. Later, there were the tales about two strippers from Mexico City. One of them was born in Mérida, Venezuela,
38 VICE.COM